The Project Gutenberg eBook, Across the Fruited Plain, by Florence
Crannell Means, Illustrated by Janet Smalley

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Across the Fruited Plain

Author: Florence Crannell Means

Release Date: June 25, 2006 [eBook #18681]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN***

E-text prepared by Meredith Minter Dixon <dixonm@pobox.com>

ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN

by

FLORENCE CRANNELL MEANS

With Illustrations by Janet Smalley

[Cover Illustration: Cars]
[Cover Illustration: Hoeing]
[Cover Illustration: Picking]
[Cover Illustration: Weeding]

New York : Friendship Press, c1940

Plans and procedures for using _Across The Fruited Plain_ will be
found in "A Junior Teacher's Guide on the Migrants," by E. Mae
Young. Photographs of migrant homes and migrant Centers will be
found in the picture story book _Jack Of The Bean Fields_, by Nina
Millen.

This book is dedicated to a whole troop of children "across the
fruited plain": Tomoko, Willie May, Fei-Kin, Nawamana, Candelaria
and Isabell, and to the newest child of all--our little Mary
Margaret.

[Illustration: Cissy and Tommy at the Center]

CONTENTS

Foreword
1: The House Of Beecham
2: The Cranberry Bog
3: Shucking Oysters
4: Peekaneeka?
5: Cissy From The Onion Marshes
6: At The Edge Of A Mexican Village
7: The Boy Who Didn't Know God
8: The Hopyards
9: Seth Thomas Strikes Twelve

FOREWORD

Dear Mary and Bonnie and Jack and the rest of my readers:

Maybe you've heard about the migrants lately, or have seen
pictures of them in the magazines. But have you thought that many
of them are families much like yours and mine, traveling
uncomfortably in rattly old jalopies while they go from one crop
to another, and living crowded in rickety shacks when they stop
for work?

There have always been wandering farm laborers because so many
crops need but a few workers part of the year and a great many at
harvest. A two-thousand-acre peach orchard needs only thirty
workers most of the year, and one thousand seven hundred at
picking time. Lately, though, the